We take walking for granted. The fact that most humans are naturally coordinated to walk on two feet and navigate their environment is an evolutionary marvel. Video games never consider the complexities of walking and balance when getting around because it’s something we don’t even think about. Death Stranding dared to explore this phenomenon, but only in the most basic and commercial way possible.
Most “walking sims” are first-person spectator games. Sometimes you explore a little and play around with objects or solve some puzzles, and maybe run and hide from a monster. These kinds of gameplay gimmicks always seemed like desperate and pretentious attempts to put depth into their games because nobody was ever bold enough to take the “walking sim” to its logical conclusion… until now.
Finally, an epic walking-sim where you control each foot independently and balance the player character’s center of mass. Can such an experiment work? Find out in our Baby Steps review!
Baby Steps
Developer: Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platforms: Windows PC, PlayStation 5 (reviewed)
Release Date: August 28, 2025
Price: $19.99
Meet Nathan. He’s an unemployed, unemployable, and lazy 35-year-old man-child who spends his days gaming, hitting a bong, and beating his meat. He’s your prototypical millennial with no aspirations; a constant burden on his parents because he never grew up. All of this is about to change when he’s isekai’d into a mysterious and primordial land where nobody can die.
Back home, Nathan was a nobody. A nothing. An insignificant, worthless Chris-Chan-like basement dweller who probably mods for Reddit. He’s still that in this new world, but now he has to go to the bathroom and embark on an epic quest to reach the top of a mountain. Like a Hobbit booted from the Shire, his quest is one of self-discovery, where he will meet lots of strange characters along the way… and walk… like a lot of walking.
Baby Steps is a walking-sim in the most literal sense. Players will have to individually guide each step manually and consider the terrain, slope angle, and try to keep Nathan balanced. The controls are deceptively simple: left trigger raises the left foot, right trigger raises the right foot, left analog stick shifts Nathan’s weight in any direction, and the right stick rotates his facing direction/camera.
Getting Nathan to go anywhere is tricky. He is prone to falling over, and it’s very easy to overstep and make him collapse into a funny and painful-looking split. Baby Steps is best described as fumble-core exploration, leaning on dynamic physics and inverse kinematics. The entire world and its objects have collision applied, making it possible for Nathan to step up on basically anything that would be believable.
The effect is absolutely ridiculous. Successfully walking with a steady rhythm makes Nathan resemble an overgrown toddler as he hilariously hobbles and flabby arms dangling like he’s some kind of handicapped Muppet. Nathan will spread his arms out as a sign that he’s about to lose balance. This is the closest Baby Steps gets to having a UI in the game at all.
Walking is tough, but climbing is harder. Whether you’re going up stairs, jutting branches, muddy slopes, or rock ledges, expect to precariously plant Nathan’s grippers carefully. Clearing a gap with a 250-foot drop with a surgically placed step will make you feel like you’re Hermes… Until you inevitably screw up later on, sending Nathan to rag doll his fat body tumbling down the side of a cliff and sliding into a muddy ditch, leaving poopie-looking skid marks all over his onesie.
Baby Steps is a game that will make you feel a whirlwind of emotions. One moment might make you feel like you can take on anything the game throws at you. The next moment will make you feel utter despair and hopelessness as you look up from the trash heap that has developed a distinctly Nathan-like indent.
Other times, you’ll feel completely lost in the massive open world. There is no map, and the game mocks the idea of having one. The side activities and challenges to partake in are amusing and award Nathan with a silly hat that he can lose. In Baby Steps, pain is the name of the game, and you must learn to love losing because Nathan is a loser.
Baby Steps is also an intensely funny and bizarre game. The brand of humor is very improvisational, likely performed by the developers. Scenes are very uncomfortable and deliberately awkward, sometimes juvenile, but always energetic. The full-frontal male nudity is used for laughs, and floppy dongs are always funny.
Figuring out where to go isn’t even that important. Baby Steps wants you to explore and to mess around. The critical path is very obscured and is vaguely somewhere at the top of the mountain, which seems like it’s the size of Olympus Mons. Just getting to the top will take about 10 hours or more, depending on how things go.
Beneath the shitpost-style game design and humor, it feels like something is going on under the surface. Obvious messages about the hopelessness of the millennial generation aside, Baby Steps is a mythic quest. A Sisiphean epic, but instead of rolling a massive boulder up a mountain, he’s hauling his massive, jiggling, cottage cheese-ass to the summit.
Baby Steps is an avant-garde comedy masterpiece; a searing mockery of modern game design conventions. The walking-sim gameplay is impressively designed and more sophisticated than it appears despite the silliness of the game’s presentation.
It has side quests that you can easily screw up and permanently fail, highlighting Nathan’s futility and hopelessness. It’s a game that is hilarious as it is soul-crushing, making it a hard sell for normie gamers. This is one for players who crave something unique and interesting. The ambient music that sounds like wildlife hip-hop and naturalistic voice acting gives it a bespoke texture that isn’t like anything else out there.
Baby Steps was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a code provided by Devolver Digital. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Baby Steps is now available for Windows PC (via Steam) and PlayStation 5.
